Catholic Guilt

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Biden’s bet is that he knows these voters, and that their hearts are broken. But the Scranton of his childhood, the one he’s pitching to America, is an illusion.These days, the cathedral-size churches that dot the Wyoming Valley around Scranton are a lot emptier than they used to be. The white-ethnic Catholicism of Biden’s childhood still has a presence—the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade and La Festa Italiana, the Italian heritage festival, both open with a Mass. But the growing neighborhoods are Nepalese, and the parishes founded by the Irish now hold Spanish-language Mass. In Hazleton, less than an hour southwest of Scranton in Luzerne County, the Latino population has gone from one-third to well more than half of the city’s population over the past 10 years. These voters, with whom Biden sometimes struggles to connect, will determine what happens in Pennsylvania this election year just as much as the white working-class Catholics of Biden’s ads.

People here joke that Scranton is 20 years behind America, that coming here is like taking a step back in time. Everyone has their favorite Italian restaurant for celebrations after Mass and baptisms; red-brick Catholic colleges still dominate the landscape downtown. But like the rest of America, it’s a city where people feel disillusioned by their Church, and by their government. Biden’s campaign is a plea to return to a different time in America, when things weren’t so fractured. And he is leaning on his faith to make the pitch.

“People see his faith as part of who he is,” Casey said. “It’s very difficult, I think, to manufacture that. Some politicians try, and they always fail.” Biden’s Catholicism, Casey said, is a window, so that “people can better understand who he is.” For others, it’s a source of doubt: Does Biden share their faith, or is he willing to bend it to the political needs of his party?

On a recent afternoon, I walked through Biden’s old neighborhood and up the long hill to the IHM Center in north Scranton. Students had just returned to campus at nearby Marywood University, the school the sisters oversee, amid the lingering summer heat. In the friendship garden behind their building, four sisters sporting sensible pixie cuts gathered around a spread of individually wrapped saltines and Ritz Crackers, a COVID-appropriate expression of their trademark hospitality. These women have had a front-row seat to the intra-Catholic division that may determine the 2020 election.

This fall, the IHM sisters erected a giant Black Lives Matter sign near the entrance to Marywood, using the M from the school’s logo. Alumni and community members started complaining, and one concerned citizen even wrote a letter to the school’s president, who is also a nun, to inform her that someone had hijacked the space. The sisters get “a lot of flack” for the sign and other efforts to reach out to Black people in Scranton, Margaret Gannon, an 87-year-old sister who wore a matching pink mask and sweater, told me. To the sisters, there’s no question that their rightful place is standing with the Black Lives Matter movement. For too long, they said, white Catholics yearned for assimilation and shied away from pushing for racial justice. Today’s IHM sisters are determined not to excuse bigotry just to appear polite. “Fighting against respectability” is “No. 1” for the sisters, Gannon said.